1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing device and an image processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
A printing apparatus, which prints information such as characters and images on a printing medium, is known. As a printing system, an ink-jet printing system, which performs printing using inks, is available. In recent years, a multifunction printer, which adopts such ink-jet printing system (to be referred to as an ink-jet multifunction printer hereinafter), has prevailed. As a feature of the ink-jet multifunction printer, a copy process on plain paper and a direct print process on photo paper can be achieved by a single printer.
As a printing speed is increasing, it is required to speed up image processes. The image processes are implemented by hardware or software. The hardware scale and cost essentially have a proportional relationship. In order to reduce a product price while enhancing functions, so as to gain greater customer satisfaction, the processing performance has to be improved while suppressing hardware cost. Hence, a hardware technique, which flexibly changes processes according to specifications and intended purposes, has been proposed (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-178546).
In general, in a copy process, for example, a character modification process is executed. The character modification process is executed to suppress an adverse effect on a halftone dot part due to emphasized edges of a character part. For this reason, in this process, a character area and halftone dot area have to be determined, and image processes suited to the respective areas have to be executed (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-77623).
Upon printing a photo image (so-called photo printing), for example, a dodging process is executed. In dodging, in order to suppress an adverse effect on a background part while maintaining an appropriate lightness level of an object in a backlight state, an object area and remaining area have to be determined, and processes suited to the respective areas have to be executed (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 9-18704). Likewise, even in a red-eye correction process for removing a red eye at the time of flash imaging and a noise reduction process for removing dark part noise at the time of photo imaging, a uniform process is not applied to the entire image. That is, a correction process has to be applied to a specific adverse effect occurrence area while suppressing an adverse effect on a part having good image quality (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open Nos. 11-355591 and 2004-15322).
When the aforementioned image processes (that is, those according to areas) are to be speeded up in the copy process or photo printing process, dedicated circuits for those processes are normally arranged. For this reason, an apparatus, which includes both a copy function and photo printing function like an ink-jet multifunction printer, has to incorporate both the circuits, and cannot avoid an increase in cost.
Furthermore, since the respective circuits are required to execute image processes in parallel according to areas, a heavy processing load is imposed on such data transfer control. For this reason, for example, an access speed drop to a memory occurs.
In order to suppress this memory consumption, for example, an index addressing method or the like may be adopted. However, in case of an apparatus having multiple functions like, for example, a multifunction printer, indices and addresses have to be set to cover all of the plurality of image processing modes in that apparatus, and it is difficult to implement such method.